Great Depression firms systematically replaced black workers with white ones

Evidence

A generation or two removed from slavery, few black Americans had this kind of money, and the Great Depression only made their situation worse. In the 1930s, roughly 80 percent of black Americans were living in the South, and their unemployment rates were much higher than those of white Americans. Nearly 70 percent of Atlanta’s black residents were unemployed in 1934—at least double the number of white Atlantans without a job. One reason for this disparity is that during the Great Depression, when so many Americans were desperate for work, it was a regular practice for companies to replace black workers with white ones. In 1936, more than half of all southern urban black families reported annual incomes of 750 or less, compared with 12 percent of white families. The median annual income for black families in Atlanta was only one-third that of white families in southern cities. While more than a quarter of white Americans earned more than 2,500, less than 2 percent of black Americans fell into that category. Mired in poverty and unemployment, black Americans in general were beneficiaries of a policy that taxed only the wealthiest Americans. But that would soon change. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 47

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The replacement of black with white workers during desperation is a concrete injustice-mechanism that parallels the structural causation spine of the pieces.